Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
TA-NEHISI COATESReparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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I think there’s a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that’s not really it.
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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
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They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
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An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
TA-NEHISI COATES